As many of the questions require a technical response, the decision was made to have the Lab’s subject matter experts address them directly through the forum thread itself after the Town Hall meeting, a process which may take several days to complete. So if you did ask a technical question that wasn’t raised at during the event, be sure to check the thread to see if an answer in provided there.

The following is a summary of the answers to questions asked during the Town Hall session, audio extracts and video time stamps provided as reference. The video is embedded at the end of the article.

Please note that this is not a full transcript of the event. Producing a word-for-word transcript takes a lot of time. Instead, I have attempted to bullet-point the replies offered, and have included an audio extract and a time line to the relevant point in the video.

Will there be a way to hide the default mesh avatar without alpha masks?

Will attachment points be increased?

Will more shape sliders be possible?

These notes don’t necessarily follow the chronological flow of the session, as I’ve attempted to group subjects by topic for more concise reference.

There is a degree of choppiness in Ebbe’s audio (present on the videos as well). This is down to Voice issues in SL. Because of this break-up, some of the audio clips are edited to remove elements where the break-up is particularly bad, but hopefully without losing the actual context of what was being said.

Video timestamps will open the official video in a separate browser tab at the start of the specified time period, allowing readers the choice of listening to the audio extract, or the video recording.

Due to the brevity of some answers, not all replies given below have an audio extract – but they all have links to the official video.

Opening Comments

Exciting year for Linden Lab – 15 years in the business, lot of investment in SL going on + growing the SL team. There’s a lot going on that has the Lab optimistic about the future, and looking forward to being on the journey for a long, long time to come.

In March LL announced a very aggressive roadmap, possibly more than could be achieved within 2018, but goals have been pursued and people hired to help meet them.

Perhaps most noticeable work has been the re-balancing the economy: reducing the price of land and finding other means by which the Lab can generate revenue that are fairer for everyone – users and the Lab.

This means some things get cheaper [e.g. land], and other may get more expensive [e.g. transaction fees] for people as things are adjusted.

Overall response has been positive – particularly the lower Mainland costs – increased “free” tier, which is still keeping the land team busy in handling purchase requests.

Roadmap also noted new games and experiences, and the next one is “not far away”.

Themed learning islands were mentioned, for more vertical acquisition of new users, and tests have been run.

More value for premium members is coming, but no announcements to make during the town hall.

Return of last names may not roll-out before the end of 2018; there’s still a lot of work to be done.

Grid-wide experience operation for users also may not be deployed before the end of 2018.

Work is continuing on Linden Home improvements, but not clear if this will be deployed all at once or in stages. The hope is to start releasing some of them before the end of 2018.

Moving SL to a cloud infrastructure will not be completed until “well into” 2019. Work is progressing on a server-by-service basis.

He is personally every excited with all that is happening, the SL team is dedicated to the work and is growing, and Lab is very pleased with the positive responses from users to the changes and improvements being made.

Q&A Session

Land and Pricing

What was the rationale the up-front higher fees for grandfathered regions?

The 2016 buy-down offer was to encourage people who knew they were going to keep land for at least 6 months to obtain lower tier.

The structure meant that the up-front cost (US $600) could be recouped in 6 months, allowing the land holder to continue to enjoy a much reduced monthly tier.

The transfer fee of US $600 for grandfathered / bought-down regions (compared to the US $100 for “retail” prices regions) is intended to operate the same way: to encourage those who wish to obtain grandfathered land and will hold on to it for a period of 6 months or more to do so, and so continue to enjoy the lower monthly tier.

The US $100 transfer fee can still be applied to grandfathered regions, but they will revert to the full monthly tier rate, so the US $600 isn’t necessarily a barrier to selling the land.

Will there be further land pricing reductions / increases in land capacity (prim allowance)?

Both are things the Lab wants to do.

Land price reductions depend on the Lab being able to generate revenue and remain healthy as a business via other means – increased transaction fees, increased check-out fees, increased and broader Premium subscription options, etc., all of which are constantly being looked at.

Increasing the land capacity is a matter of performance and hardware improvements. If these continue to be made, then further increases to land capacity might be possible.

With the move to the cloud, will it be possible on demand water spaces to connect regions, or have “pop-up trees on abandoned land?

Probably not feasible to have all “blank” spaces on the gird become sailable / flyable water due to cost in running water regions even on demand, plus some region / estate owners may not want such connectivity to their regions.

Might be possible to improve some connectivity between exiting continents.

Won’t be something that will happen immediately, but could be looked into in the future.

When will Premium members be able to select their own first / last name combination?

Requires a lot of back-end updates across services where it has always been assumed names do not change – the Marketplace, the viewer, back-end systems, etc. All of these have to be updated and fixed to ensure changes can be correctly handled.

There is no date on when the ability will be deployed; the goal has been 2018, but this is possibly “a stretch”, although the work remains a priority.

As and when it is ready, it will be announced as such by the Lab.

In short:

People will be able to select their last name from a list that will be periodically refreshed & there will be the option for users to suggests names that can be added to the list.

Once a first name / last name combination has been selected, it is unique to that user, and cannot be used by anyone else, even if it is not currently being used.

Users will be able to revert to previous names combinations they’ve selected, as well as picking news name combinations.

Are there any plans for changes / improvements on Experience Keys (experiences)?

From Grumpity: experience keys changes are being considered.

(At a recent CCUG meeting, Oz Linden confirmed that there is a plan to allow Premium users to have more than one experience key. The time frame for when this will be implemented is still TBD, as it requires a certain amount of back-end work.)

If it is felt that specific changes are required, these should be put to the team (e.g. via the feature request Jira).

Platform Performance and Capabilities

Could a feature be implemented so that those on lower-end systems can be present in high mesh density regions with suffering a great loss of performance / has the Lab considered adding a complexity cap to prevent the upload of poorly made / unoptimised mesh models?

Lab always interested in making the platform more performant for users, and in helping creators create more optimum content.

However, the Lab also does not want to constrain land holders in what they do with their land.

How a region appears / is perceived by users is something regions designers should consider, but ultimately the choice is theirs.

Not everyone might want a performant, optimised region, because retention of visitors isn’t so critical to them.

It’s not the Lab’s place to dictate what someone can / cannot do, content-wise with their region’s design.

But, the more that can be done to encourage creators make the right decision about the content they use, and helping people make better decisions on content design and use is what the Lab is interested in.

Why is so much consideration given to backwards compatibility, rather than focusing on enabling features and capabilities that allow SL to match modern games, etc?

Backward compatibility is a concept the Lab has been committed to in SL – and now in Sansar, as that has emerging content.

When there is an economy that allows people to buy things, there is an expectation that those things will keep on working, and people can get upset if things just suddenly stop working.

If updates and changes are simply allowed to break, who then becomes responsible for the financial outlay in replacing them? What level of confidence in the economy would be left if the expectation is that things will one day “just break”?

The belief is that the Lab can progress Second Life without having to break legacy content.

This question also sits at the opposite end of the scale to the last, demonstrating just how broad the scope of use case SL has to try to meet: from allowing those on relatively low-end systems be able to participate, through to satisfying the needs of those using power gaming rigs. This balance is a challenge to achieve.

Sansar opted to go for the more modern approach to rendering, etc., allowing it to have a higher visual fidelity – but it comes at the price of requiring higher specification computers.

When will there be an official native Linux client again?

Seen as a difficult issue. Lab does not have significant in-house Linux expertise, and Linux represents such a small percentage of SL users (estimates are around 1-1.5%) that resources tend to be put elsewhere.

There is a project to try to produce a 64-bit .DEB version of the Linux viewer (see here for more), but this is not a priority in the viewer development team.

There have been calls to the Linux community for contributions to help achieve this (see here). Developers interested in helping are asked to contact Oz Linden.

Will continue to develop and enhance programme, looking at the data as to performance, cost of conversion (from audience to sign-up), what’s the retention (from sign-up to engaged user), etc.

Marketing SL is a challenge, and the platform offers so much, and so many people use it for so many different reasons, it equates to trying to market a country to potential visitors – what actually might appeal to them / make them want to come?

A lot of confidence that the campaigns can attract and retain new users.

Also looking at improved campaigns to both re-engage users who have departed SL / not logged into it for an extended period and to better address current users and keep them engaged in the platform (e.g. by advising them of events and activities they might be interested in, etc.).

Themed advertising campaigns are being run, and can be tied to themed landing pages and themed learning islands for incoming new users. Read more here. Image courtesy of Linden Lab

Marketplace

Could gacha items be separated out from general listings, either with their own category or tag? Can more be done to prevent the misuse of tags (e.g. so that dogs don’t show up when searching for handbags)?

In an open environment like the Marketplace, managing the use of tags is difficult, as it relies on people playing by the rules and not mis-tagging in an attempt to generate sales.

Human policing of tags isn’t feasible: there are 5+ million items listed on the MP, with many of them being changed daily.

It might be possible to carry out some deep analysis of how tags are being used, and refining how they can be used in the future, but again, a manually intensive task.

Might be possible to make some logic changes around tags, but really, it is like dealing with spam e-mails: the more systems are refined to deal with it, the more people find ways around the filtering.

Gachas are popular, and perhaps could be better categorised and managed on the MP, but this is more a question for Grumpity Linden and the Product and Marketplace teams.

5 thoughts on “September 2018 Town Hall with Ebbe Altberg: transcript with audio”

They are killing me with the delay on the last names. I’m happy they are bringing it back and while I can appreciate the issues they are experiencing, I can’t help but think that this would not have happened had they not done away with these in the first place! New people since they brought in “resident” as a last name can’t help but feel discriminated against either. Everyone got a last name up to 2010, then new people were just “resident” and now they are bringing it back, but, oh yeah, now you have to be a premium member not like like before when it was the norm. Now, we’ll make you pay for it! Yeah, I admit it, I’m feeling jaded about LL. All the new changes seem designed to make them more money. Meh.

I actually asked (twice) about the Lab’s view on the new EU copyright laws & whether there might be changes to SL / Sansar policies as a result – but it was ignored. I also have an outstanding request in writing on the matter with the Lab that I’ll be chasing. Depending on any feedback, I may offer something through this blog.

Sep 12, 14:30 PDTCompleted - The scheduled maintenance has been completed.Sep 12, 12:15 PDTIn progress - Scheduled maintenance is currently in progress. We will provide updates as necessary.Sep 12, 11:41 PDTScheduled - Phone and chat support will be unavailable from 12:15 PM PDT to 2:30 PM PDT today, September 12th, 2019. Ticket submissions will still be ava […]

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